John and Patrick Collison on Stripe's Growth, Agent Commerce, and the Future of Software

The world is going to need platforms that support billions of transactions per second, billions of transactions per second, which no payment rail or platform does today. Where we think things will go is just a huge amount of agentic commerce. And again, we're seeing a little bit of it today. We think there'll be a taunt of it. And that is what United Stablecoins today eye, because we think you're going to need blockchains and better blockchains. Up until now, the economics of software have been conceived of as fixed costs and then infinitely monetized or monetized as much as possible. That has these. And a winner take all the dynamics. But once there are inference costs and custom creation involved, it really shifts. I mean, one executive who said, "Oh, yeah, we started augmenting our customer service with the ISO people are more productive, but we're just going to go back to doing it the whole fashion way." Stripe process more than a trillion dollars in payments last year. It grew 34 percent. And according to Patrick Collison, 2026Q1 may be looked back on as the first quarter of the singularity. That's not a marketing line. It's what the data is showing. The 2025 cohort of businesses on Stripe is larger and performing better on a per business basis than any prior cohort. And the trend is accelerating. In this conversation recorded live on TPPN, John and Patrick Collison walk through what they're actually seeing in the real economy. By agentic commerce will require blockchains, capable of billions of transactions per second, and a reframe on software itself from mass-produced product to something bespoke, cooked fresh at the moment of use, like pizza. This conversation originally aired on TPPN, hosted by John Cougan and Georgie Hayes. We have John Patrick Collison. Yo, geez. From Stripe, how are you guys doing? It's going on. Greetings. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much. This is huge. I went through why I see you guys were massively influential in my career and it's a joy to speak to you today on such a big day. But I'd love for you to kick it off with the actual news. What happened? Why are we talking to you today? We have two announcements today. One is we're launching a tender offer for employees and staff and kind of the valuation everything tended to get a bunch of headlines. The thing that was honestly more work was we released our annual letter, where every year we sum up all the trends that we're seeing on Stripe. Stripe is growing a loss. We grew up 34% last year because the business on Stripe are growing a loss and there's just, as you guys know, there's a lot happening in tech right now. This is why we need TPPN. This is why we need non-stop stream of everything going on because there is so much happening. We'll move to 24 hours eventually. Eventually. But I feel like there is a ton of AI noise and stories and drama and we are never running out of stuff to talk about. But what are you actually seeing in the data? There's always this disconnect between the market and the real economy. People are still shopping in retail stores occasionally. Where is AI actually moving the needle? Well, generally speaking, I would say from this Stripe data, it looks like the economy isn't pretty good shape. There's been, to say the least, there's been some volatility in markets over the last two years and all sorts of different events and deep-seek moments and what have you. But if you look at the actual real economy times series, if you look at what's actually happening subsequently over the last two years, things, I mean, it's always hard to prognosticate the future. But over the last two years, things that really seem to be in good shape. The thing that's really catching our attention. One second. I'm just curious. Maybe the businesses are doing well on Stripe because they're forward-looking, extremely tapped in, working on the right things. If you look at a bunch of legacy providers, you would see that actually there are a bunch of businesses out there that are slowing down, that maybe are feeling effective, just overall consumer spending. Have you tried to kind of like break that out or understand that dynamic? It's obviously hard to measure because we don't have that data, we only have our data. But I think there is some of that composition effect. And we see it, I guess, both in Stripe's data compared to, say, public earnings from others, like, clearly the respective populations are performing somewhat differently. But I guess we also see it qualitatively in the conversations we're having with customers where what tends to happen, say, for some incumbent is they built some business, they installed some system long before a strike even existed. Maybe there's some sense that well, if that broke and don't fix it, but then they decide, hey, we're going to do something new. And when they're doing something new, then they want to use the best infrastructure that will enable them to move the fastest and larger the most countries and support stable coins and do things with their eye and whatever. And then they tend to lodge that in Stripe. There is this qualitative sense that once the company decides to do something innovative, new, retoolable, what have you, and they're more likely to come to terms. >> Are you seeing overlap between stable coin activity and AI activity? There's been sort of a new narrative around agents will use stable coins. But I feel like agents can use legacy payment rails just fine. And then also you can do really cool things with stable coins that are not really AI native necessarily. So I'm wondering how much overlap there is there. >> I would distinguish between how things work today and how things will work in the future. In terms of how things work today, agents absolutely can. A lot of people build with Stripe. You know, you can have a one time use credit cards that your agent can go out and spend. But if you look at what's happening, there's lots of, but agents having to solve captures to be able to do stuff on the wider web. Clearly, the web is not built for agents. And as a result, they have to get creative to actually do any real world tasks. And that's true in economic activity as well. Where we think things will go is just there will be a huge amount of agent at commerce. We think there'll be a torrent of it. And that is what United States stable coins in AI. Because we think you're going to need blockchains and better blockchains. I'm going to say, I mean, this was our thinking behind incubating tempo because you're going to need to really high throughput blockchains for the agents. Can you take us through some of the historical technologies that led to growth in just internet payments? I'm thinking about like mobile, social commerce, one click check out Apple pay. Like there's so many things when I think about the agent to commerce boom that's coming. Like it could be helping a better version of Siri up and, you know, chat GPT, lowering this out very aggressively, but also, you know, smart speakers, smart lamps like your watch. Like there's so many different pieces to unblock and unhobble the actual agents as they go about their day. Well, can I answer a slightly different question? But then we can come back to that. A point I just then, sorry, this is a, we'll tell you the questions you tell us your answer. Sorry. You know how brothers are. And so I just want to lose one point for the prior question about, you know, what we're seeking in the economy because I feel like, I mean, this is very arbitrary, obviously, but I feel like there's at least a reasonable chance that 20, 26 to one will be looked back upon as the first quarter of the singularity. And maybe in three years in hindsight, that'll look completely delusional. I don't know. But we're seeing, I mean, there's kind of the macroscopic picture, the striped user base and things overall looking pretty good and so forth. And the two months, not quite showing up. But when we look at the cohorts and then when we look at the businesses that signed up in 2023 and their progression and trajectory over the subsequent months, the businesses that signed up in 2024 and then the business signed up in 2025, there's been a phase transition in 2025 where there are both more of them and on a per business basis, they are on average doing better. And which is really striking. You see, I think, okay, well, does this cavalcade of new lightweight five-coated applications or something, but you know, that's not really a lot of substance there. We're actually seeing both numbers move together. There are many more business getting started and the average median business is in fact performing better. We're only a couple weeks into 2026, but it looks tentatively, like 2026 may plausibly be an acceleration even over that significant leap of 2025. So I don't know, I mean, there's, we've had all sorts of dramatic AI inventions and innovations over the last couple of years. There's a bit of a question of, well, how and where and and how do we think about how it'll translate to the economy? I would say looking at real purchasing behavior on stripe, 2025, end of 25, beginning of 26 is when I feel like we're really starting to see it. That's super interesting data. One, because we were, there was some survey that came out yesterday or maybe it was late last week that said they asked like, they asked a bunch of executives, are you getting any value out of AI? And 80% of them said no, but clearly if you look, you, when you look at, come on, that's hogwash. Like five, be one executive who wants a refund under tokens. Five, be one executive who said, oh, yeah, we started augmenting our customer service with AI so people are more productive. of, but we're just going to go back to doing it the old fashioned way, or like we're spinning our codes by hand. And you know, we don't need to any of this automated loom technology. And just like we do. Yeah. I'm not saying I could pick out about reasons. No, no, I'm not saying I agree with it. No, I can pick out a bunch of reasons why it would be wrong. One reason it might be wrong is they are not in the weeds actually using the tools. And so they just think, well, we might not even be aware that they're using the tools because it's buried under the and they're not stealing. They're not feeling the acceleration because they're not. They're not. Yeah. I wanted to ask how you guys think about incubations like tempo. Yeah. When you look at when I look at Atlas and what Jeff and the team have done there, you think even in your, I don't know, kind of like the most wild projection that you had early with Atlas, like, hey, maybe someday a quarter of the of the C corpse in the United States could be, you know, built on this platform. Anybody would have said that was insane. And yet here we are. Gosh, I am. I'm not sure what to say really except we just, we just try to pay a lot of attention to the, I mean, as you guys know, there's a lot of pain points that went to starting a company. And we just try to take them seriously. And then, you know, it's the line, you know, so much of such of these things is just a long obedience in the same direction. Like Atlas is now this great overnight success, but we launched Atlas, I think in over 20 or 20, made 2015. And so, you know, 10 years of of compounding. And yeah, now it's that's a pretty meaningful, meaningful scale. And you know, look, I think tempo will plot at the same shape where we think is, I mean, to get into this AI discussion and us sounding a bit unwards and untethered. Like, I think the world is going to need platforms that support billions of transactions per second, billions of transactions per second, which no payment rail or platform does today. But even in the success case, it's not going to be an overnight thing. It's going to be, you know, five, six, seven years. And then maybe we'll have conversations about how, you know, tempo certainly became an overnight success or something. But done. I think I think Patrick's a bit the fish in water who can't, you know, who doesn't know things are West. My framework would be you can't guess to MBA brain about new products. You can't have your spreadsheet that's like, oh, the time is this. And just like reason about things. Yeah, you should never say we want one percent of global GDP. Exactly. You guys never, you wait, you guys never pitched that? Well, companies, yeah, we actually never thought about Stripe and GDP terms until one day we realized, oh, hang on. Oh, that's such an important lesson because so many, so many, like many founders, how many pitch decks have you seen? We're like, sure. That gave. Yeah, we just need one percent. It's kind of, it's a meme. You can go back in the wayback machine and find the early Stripe websites, but we were very focused on payments for developers and making that experience good. But where I'm going is I think you have to reason in product specifics. And so again, I think any MBA would have told you that the adjacency of, you know, incorporation makes no sense. It's not related to, you know, what's our right to win? It was only things people say, whereas we actually go talk to founders or like guys, it's like this is the single biggest issue I run into starting my company. And similarly with tempo and just as we think about incubations, we're trying to solve a real problem here. Where we talk to the letter about bridge having operational issues, not because of bridge, but because of blockchain congestion, where, you know, you have coins that are or blockchains both used for kind of memecoin trading and also serious real world payments. And so we just want low latency high through push payments. And we're going to need much higher throughput for the agents. But anyway, I think you have to reason in very specific product terms. What specific products are you excited about in the unharbling of agent of commerce? We laid out in the letter basically these, these levels of agent of commerce because I think like everything in AI, people want to sell a hypey store. And so they, you know, talk about how the machines will buy everything, you know, without even consulting you. And people aren't actually, you know, that seems far off. They're not that excited about that. You can start from just the basics of why are we filling out forms? Like that, you know, you were talking about the progression of commerce. Why can't I just send something to, you know, a link to chat GBT and have it bias? Or why can't I search, you know, outside of, you know, just doing a basic keyword search or something like that. And so a lot of the work Stripe is doing is building the infrastructure we're working with all the big retailers that you would expect. The, you know, Etsys and Shopify's and Best Buies and Wal-Mart's and folks like this to make product catalogs viable within the AI apps. And there's basically a ton of boring API and protocol and infrastructure work, which, you know, we love that's our business. But people just want to be able to do shopping, do discovery, do purchases within the AI apps. And then there's more kind of abstract lady, you know, we've been in this kind of the specific agenda commerce thing. And then there was just sort of the general question of how software will change because of agents. And I've been thinking about us, you know, a bit, maybe software becomes a bit like pizza. And that is to say, you know, you, software historically has been created. Not like pizza, some would say. Months, years beforehand. And then, you know, freeze dried and whatever you, you, you, you, you, prepare it at the sort of moment of consumption. But we're actually going to, you know, software should be like pizza and something that should be cooked right then and there at the moment of use. And so it's this, this quite fundamental shift where you don't want mass produced industrial scale software. You want bespoke custom software made for you that moment. That's, and that's very fundamentally different. It's kind of the, you know, the, the, up until now, the, the economics of software have been, you know, conceived of as fixed cost and then infinitely monetize or monetize as much as possible. That has these kind of winner take all dynamics. It's kind of the non-wall russian software regime. And just, I don't know, I don't quite know where it goes. But and I think, I think it's going to look very different. Last question. Pineapple on pizza, yes or no? Ireland was, was big into pineapple on pizza. Ireland not a big pineapple growing country. I will concede. But a lot of pineapple in the pizza. A very large fraction of the banana market. Don't forget. So we punch above our race and fruits that don't grow there. There we go. There we go. I love the round is exciting. The, the, the overall growth of volume is exciting. But we wanted to hit the gong for how many books you guys are selling. Oh, yeah. Can you give us, can you give us the numbers there? Scale that operation. Stry press and just, well, actually, we have the letter we sold our millionth book. But in fact, since the incredible book books, we actually now sold our 1.1 millionth book. So, but we'll look through the next gong at two. But, um, one billionth three, we love books and they're very, they're very IGI proof. Oh, yeah. No, we've been a huge fan of so much of the Stry press catalog. I haven't read them all, but I'm collecting them one at a time and I'm working through them. And every time one drops, it's always a moment. And we love them. So thank you for everything. Great to have you guys on and congratulations to the whole team on, on incredible, incredible, and Tbb amp is an amazing startup. And it's super cool to see you guys grow and build on Strype. Building more rated. Yeah, we're on Strype, build on Strype. Our first ad deal ever was a live read at a live conference. I think we charge $50 and I put and I sent someone a Strype link. Oh, well, that depends on the five whole month within the fastest ever. Yeah, see you back. But, uh, well, we'll have to have you tomorrow to our to our internal Strype show. So we'll be great. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your time. Congratulations. Good bye. Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or a review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X, A16Z, and subscribe to our substack at a16z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you with the next episode. This information is for educational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy, hold, or sell any investment or financial product. 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